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Announcement

I have too many responsibilities and really need to trim a few, so next month's post (in early September, covering the August volumes) will be my final one. It's been a nice three years but this is one of my least essential tasks so it's one of the first that I'll be leaving behind. If anyone is interested in continuing with this going forward, I'm happy to provide the prior data I have (once I properly reformat it).

How to read the charts:

• Volume number on the x, copies sold on the y.
• The darker colors are from Oricon weekly rankings (top 50), while the lighter colors are from Shoseki weekly rankings (top 500) - the latter is used when the series doesn't rank on the former. Note that depending on weekly ebb and flow, the cutoff for Oricon varies greatly - sometimes 10k will rank, sometimes 30k won't.
• The number in square brackets next to each volume number is the number of days in that respective volume's "Week 1". The tracking period is Monday to Sunday, so e.g. a volume releasing on Thursday would have a 4-day Week 1.
• Any "Week 0" sales - sales from stores that broke street date for a Monday release and are counted in the week prior - were just folded into Week 1 on my chart.
• Don't put too much stock in exact numbers. Oricon and Shoseki estimate based on their sampling, and when they overlap they'll often differ by as much as 15%. Also, they only cover print sales data (although it's widely considered that most WSJ series have a higher-than-typical print ratio, it can still potentially vary between series, and must be taken into account when comparing many years backward in time to when digital had a smaller share of the volume market), and naturally are not able to cover all sources.

Charts

Smaller dip for One Piece this month after many volumes of a consistent fall.

Whatever was holding up the previous two volumes is gone and the series is under 1 million for the first time since the anime boost. Still, it looks like the speediest part of the decline is over.

Bit of a larger dip than usual here.

Witch Watch is really forming a very nice ski slope at the moment.

The unexpectedly strong anime boost is already showing its effects here, good result for this volume. I could definitely see an increase of 20-30k from the anime.

Some bounceback after the sharp drop of the previous volume, must've been some special circumstance that I didn't realize.

Same as usual here.

Relatively steady hold.

Strong growth for Kagurabachi, it's closing in on the 100k mark soon, and with the departure of MHA will be the 5th-best seller in the magazine.

Actually a possible increase - hard to tell, but lower rankings do have less interpolation error.

Two volumes this month to finish it off and fairly flat results.

Nothing out of the ordinary for our first U19 series in a few years.

A 30k debut would be a very nice result for a rookie, but is rather underwhelming for a mangaka who was on the 3rd or 4th best seller in the market less than two years ago. We'll see how it goes, but I expect that it won't be lasting a long time.

August Volume Releases

Source: Shueisha

• My Hero Academia's penultimate Volume 41 releases alongside its final chapter, not seeing evidence of any huge shift in sales at the moment.
• Yozakura Family Volume 25 and Undead Unluck Volume 22 probably won't shift from their series' usual 30k figures.
• Sakamoto Days Volume 18 will probably track with its usual trend as well, with Volume 17 down from the Volume 16 spike.
• Similarly, Blue Box should continue as usual - Volume 16 will be the last one before the anime airing, though, so it could get interesting for the series soon.
• Kill Blue Volume 6 probably will pull around 20-25k as the series has been doing past the first volume. Interestingly, its chapter count has now surpassed that of Robot x Laserbeam.
• MamaYuyu closes out with Volume 4, should perform similarly to the past volumes.
• Kyokutou Necromance bottomed out in the ToC very quickly, so Volume 1 sales are unlikely to be particularly strong.